Australia's most left-leaning and right-leaning seats revealed

The inner-Sydney seat of Grayndler and the outback Queensland electorate of Maranoa sit at opposite ends of Australia's political spectrum, according to an analysis of Vote Compass data.

Grayndler, held by Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and encompassing inner-western Sydney suburbs such as Leichhardt, Newtown and Marrickville, is the country's most left-leaning politically.

Maranoa, an outback seat that covers 42 per cent of Queensland and captures centres such as Roma, Charleville and Longreach, is the most right-leaning; it is held by the LNP's Bruce Scott.

Explore our interactive chart, which ranks every seat in the country from the most left-leaning to the most right-leaning.

Note: The position of electorates on the graph is determined by an aggregate measure derived from answers to the policy propositions in Vote Compass. The positions of individual electorates on the graph are relative to other electorates and not intended to represent left or right in absolute terms.

FAQ

What is this?

When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called the federal election for September 7, the ABC immediately launched Vote Compass.

Since then, we have received more than 1 million responses, as people used the tool to see how their views compare to the parties' policies.

This report explores how each electorate's responses compare overall, and places them on a scale from most left-leaning to most right-leaning. Seats' positions on the chart are relative to each other, not absolute.

The data has been weighted by gender, age, education, enrolment as a student, religion, marital status, industry and state using the latest population estimates to be a true representation of opinion at the time of the field, resulting in an effective sample size of 525,343 respondents.

Vote Compass is not a random sample. Why are the results being represented as though it is a poll?

Vote Compass is not a poll. It is primarily and fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns.

That said, respondents' views as expressed through Vote Compass can add a meaningful dimension to our understanding of public attitudes and an innovative new medium for self-expression. Ensuring that the public has a decipherable voice in the affairs of government is a critical function of a robust democracy.

Online surveys are inherently prone to selection bias but statisticians have long been able to correct for this (given the availability of certain variables) by drawing on population estimates such as Census micro-data.

We apply sophisticated weighting techniques to the data to control for the selection effects of the sample, thus enabling us to make statistical inferences about the Australian population with a high degree of confidence.

There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the authenticity of each record in the dataset.

Vote Compass does not make its protocols in this regard public so as not to aid those that might attempt to exploit the system, but among standard safeguards such as IP address logging and cookie tracking, it also uses time codes and a series of other measures to prevent users from gaming the system.